The Dishonest Murderer (28 page)

“Foolish,” Pam said. “Not to let well enough alone. And, anyway, you said he thought the apartment was empty.”

“Right,” Bill said. “So I like the other theory better. We found a bottle containing chloral hydrate in the girl's kitchen. With Phipps's prints on it, not hers. That's why I said the assault with intent charge ought to be easy. The second theory is that Phipps was merely going back for the bottle, which he had fogotten. To put her prints on it. And, possibly, to give her more chloral, if she seemed to be coming out of it. Sitting in the car, he probably checked over the things he had done—washed and put away one of the two glasses they drank from, left the one with her prints, got her out and down as soon as she got drowsy. Then—he remembered he had forgotten to put her prints on the bottle. So—he had to take her back up, or bring the bottle down. Naturally, he chose to bring the bottle down.”

“And then couldn't,” Jerry said. “Because the place was full of people.”

“Right,” Bill said. “I'd guess that.”

“A confession
would
help,” Pam said. “For points like that.” She paused. “Not,” she said, “that I don't think logic is a fine thing. And then he decided, after all, to take—to take Breese to the bottle? And—make her drink?”

Bill nodded.

“He figured an alarm would go out,” he said. “He didn't want to drive her around the streets, try to put her some place. And—the police had already been in the apartment. They knew she wasn't there. So, why not put her back? And then, he improvised. Why not get Mrs. Haven over to help find her unconscious, to see him trying to revive her with black coffee, which is fine for chloral hydrate poisoning—unless the coffee happens to be full of chloral hydrate.”

“It was?” Pam said. “From his shirt?”

“Right,” Bill said. “We—well, we soaked enough out of the shirt before he came to. Blake hit him rather hard. Plenty of chloral hydrate. His point, of course, being to convince everybody that Miss Burnley had the stuff, had figured we were about to catch up with her, had decided to give the whole thing up in a—well, in a nice, easy way. Phipps hoped we were already suspicious of her and—”

“I was,” Pam said. Her voice was rather small. “Weren't you ever, Bill?”

Bill Weigand shook his head. He reminded her he had said from the start that they needed a man, not a woman.

“Also,” Bill said, “Mrs. Haven thinks that he had begun to be afraid she knew too much, had become suspicious. Because of something about perfume.” He told them about the perfume. “She thinks he may have planned to find out how much she knew and, if she knew too much, well—include her. She may very well be right. He could have shot her, put Breese's prints on the gun and got out, leaving us to assume Breese had killed Freddie, presumably because Freddie had found her out, and then herself.”

“In the end,” Pam said, “he was going to include us both. Was Blake on the fire escape all the time?”

Bill nodded.

“He waited long enough,” Pam said. “You all did.”

Bill told her they had wanted to get what they could. He told her that Blake had had his gun ready, and would have used it in time. “But then,” he added, “you all three jumped in and he couldn't. So we came in, instead. Blake had unlatched the window beforehand, of course, and lowered it a couple of inches from the top, so that he could listen.”

Bill's lobster came. He looked for the fourth martini, and found that Dorian was sipping it. She smiled at him. “Sacrificing myself,” she said. “Until you've had food, my dear.”

Bill made a face, dug into a claw, dipped lobster into melted butter, and ate. The others had finished. Pam waited until she saw Bill swallow.

“Between bites,” she said. “What was it all about? At bottom? Because, so far, we've just got the top. I mean—well, what was it all
about?
”

Bill said he knew what she meant. He said they were still piecing it together. But, at bottom, it was about the effort to bribe the senator to change his position on the hydro-electric project.

“But,” Pam North said, and looked puzzled. “I thought—I mean, in addition to everything else, he already
had
so much money. Why—?”

“Right,” Bill said. “Precisely right, Pam. Also, I take it he was an honest man. Which is no doubt why Phipps never took it up with him at all.”

The other three looked at him. He looked at his lobster, speared the other claw, let them wait.

“Some people,” Pam North said, “can't think of anything but eating.”

Bill swallowed, smiled at them, and said that it was still bits and pieces. He said they had got a good deal of it from Breese Burnley, who had got the first intimation some time before from Julian Grainger. “I told you she had been seeing him,” Bill noted, in parenthesis. “She was a pretty young thing to see when he was in New York, to take to dinner. And so forth. And so forth.”

“Delicately put, darling,” Dorian said.

Bill Weigand said he was not precisely putting it. He said he didn't know.

“However,” he said, “he did tip her off. She says she doesn't remember how, exactly. Senator Kirkhill's name came up and the elder Grainger said something to the effect that she didn't really know him; that he wasn't any knight in shining armor. I don't know whether he thought that would make any particular difference to Breese, or whether he cared. She was just a girl to take to dinner.”

“And so forth,” Pam said.

“And so forth. Anyway, Breese got enough from him to make her curious. Enough to make her think she might get something on Kirkhill. Which she wanted—well, because Kirkhill had ditched her. Ditched her, as she figured it, for Freddie Haven. She wanted to get her own back. Maybe get him back. If she could get enough on him to stop the marriage—well, call it love, call it revenge. She would have enjoyed it.”

Breese knew better than to try to get anything more from Grainger, Bill told them. But she figured that, if there was anything in it, Phipps would know. So she cultivated Phipps. Bill pointed out that she did not put it so directly, admit it had been so direct. He was summarizing. She had cultivated Phipps and—got him to talk, got him, in the end, to boast.

“Not in specific terms,” Bill pointed out. Roundabout—hints. But enough to convince her that Kirkhill was being bribed, with Phipps acting as go-between, and with Phipps making a nice thing out of it for himself. So she took a chance and wrote the anonymous letter.”

“She admits that?” Jerry asked.

“Oh yes,” Bill said. “She's very annoyed at Phipps for drugging her. She's—well, she's a chastened young woman. The police are her pals. Also, she's not in any trouble herself, which makes her very happy, very cooperative.”

“Listen,” Pam said. “I thought the senator
wasn't
bribed.”

“Right,” Bill said. “That's why he got killed.” He took the time to finish his lobster. The others looked at him with indignation. He said the lobster was very good, and that he needed coffee.

“With or without chloral hydrate?” Pam enquired, sweetly. Bill grinned at her.

“Right,” he said. “These people—the Grainger people—had approached Phipps with a suggestion that the senator could be bribed. Phipps knew he couldn't, but Phipps needed money. He said he would take it up with Kirkhill. He came back and said it was O.K., but that the senator couldn't appear personally, of course. He said he would be intermediary. He convinced them. They began to pay off. Phipps just put it in his pocket.”

“But he must have known—” Dorian said.

Bill nodded. He said one would think so. But he said that it was undoubtedly one of those things people drifted into, without any idea how serious it would become, without any real idea that, in the end, there would have to be a payoff. Probably Phipps told himself, when he thought about it, that something would turn up—perhaps that the senator would, as senators sometimes do, find another cause to espouse, would lose interest in the Authority project. Or, perhaps, Phipps figured that, if worse came to the worst, he could merely tell the Grainger people to whistle for their money, realizing that they couldn't do anything about it, having themselves singularly unclean hands.

“Look,” Jerry North said, “are you going to be able to prove all this? Or any of it?”

Bill shrugged. He said he hoped so. He admitted it might be difficult. He admitted a confession would help. He said they still might get one. “Because,” he said, “of the thirty-eight he had killed Smiley with. And his fingerprints are on the chloral bottle. And—we don't really have to prove motive, you know. We don't have to prove what it was about at bottom. Naturally, it helps if we can. And—we'll get what we want from the Grainger people. We'll have to make a trade. So for, they deny everything. But they've agreed to have the head of their legal bureau talk with the district attorney. They've even—well, they seem almost anxious. They'll come through—to a degree. They won't involve anybody important on their side, naturally. They'll—they'll throw somebody to the wolves. With the understanding that the wolves sniff him, don't cat him. ‘Trusted executive—shocked he would enter into any such negotiations—naturally Mr. Grainger knew nothing of all this—would not have countenanced any—' Well, you can figure it. The boy they throw to the wolves gets paid for it. We get what we want.”

“You know this is going to happen?”

“I'm morally certain,” Bill said. “All of this is a moral certainty. Except the rifling of the thirty-eight, the fingerprints, Miss Burnley's willingness to testify that she had a drink with Phipps, found herself in his automobile three-fourths asleep, remembers being helped back to her apartment; except the chloral in the coffee; except what he said while Blake was listening.” Bill nodded as he catalogued. “Oh, we've got him,” he said. “A confession would merely be a helpful thing.”

“The Grainger people to whistle—” Pam North prompted.

“Right,” Bill said. “Well—I imagine he found out that they weren't inclined to whistle. I imagine he found out there were some fairly tough people among them. Not Mr. Grainger, of course. Certainly not his son. But—somebody. I imagine he was told to produce, or else. And, at about the same time, Kirkhill told him to get together the data for another speech on the whole issue—a speech that went even further than those he had made previously. So Phipps had to start getting the data—really, writing—this speech which would prove that he'd been engaged in a double-cross—or that the senator had. But he didn't figure he'd be able to convince anybody the senator had. So he had this ‘or else' from the bribers on one side and whatever the senator would do to him on the other. Then it occurred to him that, with Kirkhill dead, it would all come out nicely. He could write another speech, in which Kirkhill did change his stand on the Authority, he could show it to the Grainger people, point out it wasn't his fault if the senator got himself killed before he had the chance to change his coat—presto, everything fine. So he got the senator down on the East Side, filled him with chloral, got him out in the open, probably took him to the doorway—or, at least, followed him, waited around until he was sure the chief, as he called him, was finished. Went to the party. Probably he knew the senator had a bad heart, although it wasn't very bad. Perhaps he didn't, and counted on exposure. Either way, the plan worked.”

“How did he get him down there? And—but of course, the why was merely to confuse everybody, to make you look in the wrong place.”

“Right,” Bill said. “As to how—I think he told us. He used George—George's existence, that is. Probably he went to Kirkhill with some story about George's being in a bad jam, which might involve damaging publicity; went counting on Kirkhill's tendency to go into situations with a kind of violent energy, and to do it personally. Kirkhill may have worked out the rest himself—the old clothes, so he wouldn't be recognized by whoever he was going to meet—thought he was going to meet. I'd assume some plan to pay off whoever had George in this jam. I'd assume that this first meeting was supposed to be merely preliminary, perhaps with the senator posing as a kind of body-guard for Phipps. Maybe Phipps will give us the details, eventually. But it was something like that. The whole thing, as you say, Pam, being to make us look in the wrong place. When we don't—when we don't just write it off as the work of a thug—Phipps throws us a little of the truth. He throws us George. How was he to know that George had reformed? That George had a perfectly sound alibi?”

There was a pause. Bill's coffee arrived.

“And Smiley was following the senator? Saw it?” Pam asked.

Bill shook his head.

“Smiley was following Phipps,” he said. “He'd got that far. Now that he's decided it's wise to know more, Smiley's partner, Briggs, finds he can remember more. He remembers that Smiley was following Phipps. No doubt expecting Phipps to meet a payoff man from the Grainger outfit downtown. Briggs remembers that Smiley said something about Phipps's having rented himself a hideout—actually it was a place where he and the senator could go, and the senator could change. Presumably, Smiley saw what happened, decided to shake down Phipps as well as the admiral—and got himself killed.”

“And Phipps called you up?” Jerry said. “To tell you Smiley was murdered? Why?”

Bill shrugged. He said Phipps would have to tell them that. At a guess, he had seen Mrs. Haven go into the building, hoped the police would catch her there.

“She was there,” Bill said. “She admits that, now. And the elevator man recognized her. She found Smiley, as I thought all along. She—well, she ran. Still afraid it was her father. She called after him, found he wasn't at home. Put two and two together and—well, came up with the wrong sum.”